Among all the issues in the Iranian nuclear talks with six major powers, there’s one question that won’t go away.

It’s not whether a framework nuclear deal will be ready by end-March or whether any likely agreement will sell out key western or Iranian negotiating red lines. The question that’s been debated among the core group of reporters that have long followed the talks is: What has happened to Catherine Ashton? Read More »

The heads of NATO’s 28 nations have been proclaiming their determination to spend more on defense since the Ukraine crisis erupted last year, most explicitly at a gathering of NATO leaders at a summit last September in Wales.

But a new study finds that the alliance’s members are on track to keep that promise only erratically, and a significant number are set to actually cut their military spending.

In a sample of 14 North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries, seven are planning to increase defense spending next year, six are cutting it, while one—France—is set to remain flat. Only one of these, Estonia, will hit the broad NATO goal of spending 2% of GDP on defense next year. Read More »

The European Union need not rush to judgment on the recent Minsk ceasefire and peace accords and can watch in coming months what happens in eastern Ukraine before making a decision on economic sanctions, the bloc’s foreign-policy chief said Thursday.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Federica Mogherini said the EU focus now and in coming weeks should be on doing all it can to build momentum behind the Minsk agreements and their full implementation.

She made it clear that if the situation in eastern Ukraine were to deteriorate, the EU could move rapidly to increase pressure on Russia and pro-Moscow separatists in Ukraine. Even if the conflict goes quiet in coming weeks, she says she would not expect any early decision on the bloc’s tough economic sanctions on Russia, which must be either renewed, amended or scrapped in July. Read More »

A Serbian government minister said in Budapest Wednesday that his country will try to block illegal immigration through its territory into the European Union, after a surge in the numbers of people trying to cross the Serbian-Hungarian border in the hope of getting into the bloc.

The steeply rising number of immigrants into Hungary–most coming from Kosovo—is “really frightening” but Serbia cannot be blamed for that, Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said at a press conference during a meeting with his Hungarian counterpart.

Over the past six months, some 100,000 Kosovar people have left their homeland, Mr. Dacic said adding “Serbia will do whatever it takes to halt illegal emigration.”

Hungary’s governing Fidesz party said Friday it wants to “close the country’s borders” to economic immigrants from outside the EU in reaction to a spike in their number, calling the bloc’s general immigration policy “too lenient.” Read More »

Greece’s new government faces two crunch meetings in Brussels this week: Yanis Varoufakis, the nattily-dressed Greek finance minister, will meet with his euro-zone counterparts for the first time, while Premier Alexis Tsipras will come face to face with the doyenne of European austerity, German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In the two weeks since winning national elections on a promise to end austerity, Mr. Tsipras has criss-crossed Europe, seeking to drum up support for overhauling the country’s bailout terms. He has steered conspicuously clear of Berlin, though Mr. Varoufakis did make a call – and was received frostily.

But the pressure on Athens is mounting. A Feb. 28 deadline for Greece’s current bailout program is fast approaching, and the European Central Bank turned the screw last week, saying Greek banks could no longer use Greek government bonds as collateral for ECB loans. Mr. Tsipras has said he doesn’t want an extension of the bailout program and will instead seek a bridge loan, to buy time to formulate an alternative economic plan. Read More »

Not for the first time in the last five years, those of us who follow the European Union closely — and many beyond — have been transfixed by developments in Greece. So it was last week and will be again in the week ahead. A visit by new Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras may be perhaps the most potentially newsworthy of the five scheduled things we suggest you look out for this week. Read More »

The U.S. ambassador to the European Union weighed in on the legal difficulties the bloc is facing over its sanctions regime, delivering what appeared to be a good news/bad news message.

First the bad news.

Citing a series of court decisions overturning EU sanctions listings – from the inclusion of Hamas on the bloc’s terror list to Iranian companies successfully challenging the freezing of their assets– Ambassador Anthony Gardner said “the U.S. government is increasingly concerned about weaknesses in the European sanctions mechanism.” Read More »

European Council President Donald Tusk took the Brussels diplomatic bubble by surprise Saturday night with a strongly worded message, conveyed via Twitter, on events in Ukraine and the west’s response.

Mr. Tusk has never been one to hold his tongue on the violence in eastern Ukraine and what western officials believe is Russia’s role in it.

As the fighting in eastern Ukraine worsened, he drew analogies between the weak western reaction to Nazi Germany’s aggression in the 1930s and the failure to check Moscow’s actions in Ukraine.

At the time though, he was speaking as Poland’s prime minister not as president of the European Council, a job he took up Dec. 1. In that role, he is expected to balance the various shades of opinion among European Union capitals.

Greece’s election, a meeting of foreign ministers that will discuss Russia and the aftershocks of the Paris terror attacks are set to dominate coverage of the European Union in the coming week. Here’s our top-five list of issues to watch in the week of January 19-25. Read More »

The paper certainly leaned in that direction. It addressed the conditions under which some of the core economic sanctions could be dropped and looked at reviving various channels of dialogue with Moscow on trade, foreign policy and other issues. There was no explicit mention of tightening sanctions if conditions in eastern Ukraine deteriorated, which has been a standard EU warning in ministerial statements over the last year.

In fact, the paper – as our initial story made clear – was never a definitive guide of what would come next but a discussion paper to frame a ministerial debate on Monday. It was meant to start to gather thinking about the shape of ties with Russia over time. Read More »

About Real Time Brussels

The Wall Street Journal’s Brussels blog is produced by the Brussels bureau of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. The bureau has been headed since 2009 by Stephen Fidler, who was previously a correspondent and editor for the Financial Times and Reuters. Also posting regularly: Matthew Dalton, Viktoria Dendrinou, Tom Fairless, Naftali Bendavid, Laurence Norman, Gabriele Steinhauser and Valentina Pop.